lunes, 19 de octubre de 2009

Welcome to D.I.Teachers!

My name is Jesús Bastidas (hereinafter “The Digitally Illiterate”) and this is my blog.

I created this space for two reasons. One, I had to. As part of the course I am taking on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), I had to create a blog through which I shared ideas, thoughts, findings and other things I’d learned. And two, since every day there is some new application or a new social network of some kind, and since information and knowledge travel faster than ever before, it becomes of major importance for us teachers to be up-to-date with both technology and knowledge.

As language teachers, we should be both trainers and entertainers. In my opinion, learning is easier if you learn while being amused, while getting involved. I just cannot focus if I am bored. Keeping the learner/audience pumped all the time, however, is a very hard thing to achieve and many times we do not succeed. This is when technology might come in handy.

It might not be them, it might be youWhenever we teachers get together you can hear us complain about our students and how they just do not seem to have the slightest interest in learning anything from you. The problem, I think, is that we tend to forget our context in time, and more important, that we were students once.

We are in the midst of a communication revolution. Every day we are forced to process consciously or unconsciously thousands and thousands of messages. This, to my belief, is changing the way we see things. It is even changing the way we learn and how much time we are willing to invest in learning. Today´s learner does not behave the same way you and me did ten or even five years ago, especially if you are dealing with young learners who are used to do homework, listen to music, text message, and check their Facebook and Twitter friend’s status all at the same time and with relative accuracy. If you do not see the world through a hundred windows at a time, at least try it or they will surely log out on your class and more specifically they will log out on you: the digitally illiterate teacher.

So join me and other D.I.Teachers in this quest for digital knowledge that will keep us in our student´s trending topics.